Ben Shahn's Most Famous Photographs

Ben Shahn (1898-1969) is remembered mostly as a painter, but between 1935 and 1938 he also worked as a photographer for the federal agency first called the Resettlement Administration and later the Farm Security Administration. Carrying a 35mm Leica fitted with an angle finder, which let him photograph people without seeming to aim at them, he drove through the coal country of West Virginia and Kentucky and the cotton country of Arkansas and the Deep South in the autumn of 1935, and in the summer of 1938 he spent about six weeks photographing farm towns in central Ohio.

The pages below follow the groups of pictures from those trips that are most often reproduced and searched for. Several are series rather than single frames, because Shahn usually shot a run of exposures of the same people and place. Each page explains where and when the photographs were made, who and what they show, what the original captions say (including where those captions use outdated terms), how the pictures relate to Shahn's later paintings where a source documents the link, and exactly which negatives this archive holds.